In the travel industry, operators use property management systems (PMS) to assign places, such as rooms in an hotel. The property management systems usually assign rooms manually, based on room planning criteria.
WO93/303444 (Hyatt Corporation) discloses a reservation system for a hotel having a matrix system which identifies room type, the category of rooms and combinations of both of these attributes. This system provides information of the maximum number of rooms available, the numbers of rooms already occupied, the numbers of rooms currently available etc.
Occasionally, property management systems have been known to work automatically, operating with very basic allocation processes in which the first available room is allocated to a customer. Within this automated environment a number of algorithms exist which consider the “customer value” and room attributes. The principles of the algorithm are as follows:—                A hotelier can give a weighting to each existing room attributes (for example, a sea view may have a weighting of +2, whilst a parking view may be −1; a shower may have a weighting of 0 and a bath of +1; etc.).        An overall value can be calculated from the sum of the various attributes.        The “customer value” for each customer is determined based on visit frequency and spending for example.        The process then determines rooms which match customer preferences and if several rooms form that match the process associates one room with the customer. If no rooms match, the process tries to shuffle the customers to find a combination that might work.        
A number of problems exist with these types of processes. For example, a hotel may allocate all its rooms to low value customers who were booked earlier than high-value customers that may book later. Similarly, many customer characteristics that may be available to the hotelier are not used in the consideration of room allocation or the allocation of other places.